Upon my first reading of the Etzioni autobiography, I recalled my favorite book review, written by a nine-year-old, who also should have won a prize for the youngest author and the shortest review ever: “This book told me more about penguins than I wanted to know.”

There is a lot of information in Professor Etzioni's autobiography, but I still do not know what public intellectual means. Immediately upon reading his article, I asked myself, how is a public intellectual to be distinguished from a private intellectual? Having opened the box, it was only logical to ask, “What kinds of intellectuals are there?” And I am not alone in my confusion. Alan Wolfe, a confirmed public intellectual himself, turned down this assignment on the grounds that “there is no guidebook on how to become a public intellectual.”

Etzioni's autobiography, it appears, began with a standard Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, after which he became a professor at Columbia. That career move made him a university intellectual, teaching undergraduate and graduate students, sharing and expanding his learning with other university intellectuals.

Now that I have uncovered at least three types of intellectuals already, and since there will be others, I will need designations for quick comparison. So far, we have public intellectual (PI), private intellectual (PrI), and university intellectual (UI), signified by a Ph.D. at a highly ranked university and recognition through publication in learned journals and a learned society or guild—in Etzioni's case, the American Sociological Association (ASA, which, for good reason, replaced its original name, American Sociological Society).

But “the times they were a-changing,” and Etzioni became an alienated intellectual (AI), along with Alan Wolfe and many more who were trying to get the attention of the APSA, ASA, and Washington through opposition to the war in Vietnam, while simultaneously trying to get an academic job.

Etzioni's career as a PI seems to have culminated with an article he published attacking manned space missions, which apparently landed him a year in Jimmy Carter's White House. However, he reveals that although his desk was “very close to the seat of power, it might as well have been on the dark side of the moon” (651).

This appointment is far too modest an experience, but it serves his point—that he had moved from UI to PI and from PI to AI and on to GI (government intellectual)—another intellectual modality requiring “perseverance” and “a boatload of stamina.” As a PI, he could pick his own topics and take his own position, but as a GI—and please pardon the coincidence with “government issue” or “gastrointestinal”—he would have to wait to voice his opinion until asked, and he would be expected to use his knowledge but to be sure to subordinate it to the president's wishes. If intellect implies the autonomy of thought from “the critical, creative and contemplative side of the mind” (Hofstadter Reference Hofstadter1963, 25),Footnote ¹ the intellectual turned GI must put intellect aside, subordinating it to the goal orientation of the president or, indeed, two or more aides close to the president.

Etzioni's “particularly painful” year in the White House (651) was so painful that his advice to his would-be followers is to “first lie down and see if the [PI] urge will go away” (651). Or, if you reject rule number one, fill your boat with stamina and perseverance.

But it appears that Etzioni did not take his own advice. He shot out of the government into the open arms of a social movement called communitarianism. In this case, his need was not for perseverance and stamina, but for opportunity. Mind you, this does not mean opportunism. Communitarianism as a movement had been expanding throughout the 1970s as the Democratic South began to realign and the overlapping mobilization of Christian evangelical community conservatives drew the region into the sphere of an ambitious right wing of the once-libertarian Republican Party.

These shifts were genuine stuff. Conservatism fit extremely well with communitarianism, which allowed former left-wingers—too leftist to be comfortable as Democrats—to find a comfortable home as “neo-conservatives,” spreading their embrace of Robert Bellah's Habits of the Heart all the way over to Robert Putnam's “social capital” in Bowling Alone, with its platform of “social responsibilities” up on an equal plane with individual rights. Note how smoothly a converted communitarian like Etzioni could embrace a marriage of conservatism with communitarianism while denouncing “the celebration of Numero Uno and the unfettered aggrandizement of self-interest” (651). The communitarian movement could have come from socialism and its denunciation of the free market. Nevertheless, it rang loud and clear in the fusion of Reagan libertarianism with true conservatism, and its agenda was attractive enough to transform Tony Blair Labourism into a force that could counter the extraordinary Thatcher movement in England. On our side of the Atlantic, the communitarian movement was strong enough to move the discourse from communities to community.

Etzioni seems to have left the Carter White House to expand publicly the communitarian message, assuming his “self-appointed role as a PI” (651). And he was pleased by the spread of Reaganism and Thatcherism during the 1980s. He does not try to aggrandize his influence. As a good social scientist, he recognized that his “somewhat greater effect was largely due to the fact that the time was ripe” (651). This statement confirms my recognition that he had cast away his GI identity but did not return to his status as a PI. He had become a movement intellectual—MI—an identity that is a very large distance apart from the other types of intellectual.

First of all, the MI lives a radical life but is not necessarily extremist and is certainly not violent. A “radical,” following mathematics, is concerned with roots and getting at the roots. The antagonism of the Alienated Intellectual (AI) and the Movement Intellectual (MI) is rarely violent, but it often invites violence from those being demonized. Consequently, the MI does not address the public at-large but instead concentrates on speaking to members and supporters already drawn in by the theory and ideology of the movement. This approach is why Lenin—one of the world's greatest MIs, up there close to Jesus—was moved to assert that “without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement” (Lenin Reference Lenin1969, 25).

Thus, we must revise the very definition of the social movement as a membership group whose members require constant attention. This need for attention is particularly true of faith-based movements, which have been given a proper name of American origin: the revival meeting. Virtually all movements are “a fusion of secular and sacred history” (Bercovitch Reference Bercovitch1978, 7); see also jeremiad: “a lament over the ways of the world” and “moral lessons … toward the fulfillment of … destiny” (9). David Truman, in his master work The Governmental Process (Reference Truman1951), domesticated and politicized the concept of the jeremiad in the United States through his re-creation of a history beginning with the “faction,” as invented by James Madison in the Federalist Papers, and then moving to “interests,” “party,” association,” “conspiracy,” “coalition,” “caucus,” “corporation,” and finally culminating in “the group.” Each type of jeremiad shares at least one great problem: cohesion. And they all suffer from the same danger, especially in democratic and democratizing societies: overlapping membership, which makes every movement unstable and insecure. These challenges are precisely why so many of the greatest public speakers became famous not by addressing the public, but by singing more to the chorus than to the masses.Footnote ²

Charles Tilly located the origins of social movements around the late eighteenth century in Europe and the early nineteenth century in the United States, emphasizing the phenomenon of the campaign and its “spread and transformation across all the continents” (Tilly Reference Tilly2005, 216 and passim). But in our time, almost all classes and other social ties have devoted an immense amount of effort to “internal investment.” This idea is supported by another classic work by Pool, Dexter, and Bauer (Reference Pool, Dexter and Bauer1972) that recognizes that even associations of the highest social classes have to work very hard to “speak with a single voice.”Footnote ³

Thus, as a result of their internal instability, groups, and especially politically oriented movements, have a very special need for MIs. Some of these intellectuals are, like Lenin, “present at the creation.” Others with PI, AI, or GI credentials are drawn in from one existing camp to another, as we shall see.

Etzioni is an outstanding case in point. He took his BA and MA at Hebrew University and his sociology Ph.D. at Berkeley (1958), before being appointed as an instructor at Columbia. He advanced quickly to become a full professor and department chair in 1967. He was a genuine UI during those years, making impressive contributions to peer-reviewed journals and books in the political science as well as sociology literature.

He defined himself fittingly as a leftist, and he took C. Wright Mills as his early model. But there is a big difference between the two. Mills was a leftist, but addressed almost all of his publications to the academy in general and to academic sociologists and political scientists in particular. As one theorist put it, Mills was “armed not only with Marx … but also with … Max Weber, … and [Mosca, Michels, and Pareto]” (Young Reference Young1996). Nevertheless, Mills was not a PI as it is properly understood. He wrote for the learned journals (as a UI), but as he advanced in stature, his articles tended to grow longer and more in the style of an AI. Moreover, his books were not written for the mass public. He was a fine writer, far more accessible than his sociology and political science colleagues.Footnote ⁴ Mills was one of the most famous academic authors of the 1950s, but none of his books and articles, even The Power Elite (Oxford University Press, 1956) were in the mass public domain. Throughout his tragically brief career, Mills remained an Alienated Intellectual (AI). Daniel Bell recognized Mills' concerns with the sources of power and the causes of equality and inequality, but Bell insisted that “Mills is not a Marxist, and, if anything, his method and conclusions are anti-Marxist” (Reference Bell1960, 43). He did not join any movement and was thus not an MI. In contrast, Etzioni addressed the largest possible scope. First and foremost, he was a joiner. The “Affiliation” category in his CV contains 60 entries, not including his involvements as a member of 40 editorial boards and nearly 14 consultantships, all of which are not honorific or casual. Altogether, these roles indicate his position as a true UI, at least through the time of his appointment to the White House and his jump into the MI world. But his academic career was divided between hundreds of issues, each worthy of an intellectual's attention. A scan of the titles of his works during his early to middle academic career reveals that he had a finger in every pie that could possibly be attractive to any social scientist. The titles of his publications are a smorgasbord. The best advice we can give our budding grad students is to pick a limited number of commitments and stick to them.” Etzioni surely treated these issues academically, but he cannot deny that he was spread awfully thin over the 383 “professional journals and books” in which he was engaged, as of the latest available in volume 9, issue 2 of International Studies Perspectives.

The best example of a successful PI from the late 1940s onward is probably David Riesman, particularly after the publication in 1950 of The Lonely Crowd, written with his junior partners, Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney. Popular acceptance of this book so surprised Yale University Press that they sold the book to Doubleday & Company, where a trade editor arranged for a 20% page reduction, “aimed only at greater clarity and conciseness” (Riesman Reference Riesman, Glazer and Denney1950, 5–6) Riesman's general argument is based on a demographic theory of three “types of character and society,” following an S-shaped curve from a tradition-directed social character to an inner-directed to an other-directed character. Beginning in the Middle Ages, equality of birth and death produced a “tradition-directed” social character; following that, the superiority of births over deaths produced an “inner-directed” social character; and in the third epoch, birth control gave us an “other-directed” character. Many lay readers consumed those three character types and discussed them in uncountable thousands of cocktail party conversations. But the entire academic social science audience gave the book a proper AI reading and offered devastating critiques—not out of jealousy, but in objection to his thesis—in the best tradition of academics—that is, AIs.

Let us return to Etzioni's decampment from the White House and his disappointment, which was apparently followed by a new-found inspiration: communitarianism. Although I have only been able to scan his publications, I would guess that he converted to this set of beliefs during the 1970s away from the standard leftist tendencies of sociologists and (to a lesser degree) political scientists. But his conversion was not to Buckley and the Burkeans, nor to the neo-cons through Irving Kristol and the Straussians, nor to the theocratic conservatism that is a cover for racism, nor to the wrongly labeled libertarianism that is often called conservative. It appears to me that his move was to a genuine conservatism, as observed earlier, from the communities of the social democratic phase of the Democratic party, to the community of a “moral majority” that was going to take root.

There was some elegance to this move. And it offered an opportunity to blow off the left and, especially, the Democratic Party, which was going through a phase of wandering in the wilderness. Many of the leading thinkers of the party had become communitarian to varying degrees. More to the point, the Republican Party was coming back into its own after nearly 50 years of bouncing on and off the Democratic agenda.Footnote ⁵ But the disaster of the Depression had become ancient history, Nixon's Southern Strategy was working, and the Christian Right was pulling together a genuine faith-based Republican right wing. Ronald Reagan turned out to be the magnet that pulled a new 50-state national Republican coalition together.

Reagan was necessary but not sufficient to this goal. To create a Reagan revolution that equaled Roosevelt's, the Republican Party would not only have to win an election, but it would have to catch up with changes in government. As the French might put it, the Republican Party would have to demean itself by “contamination from the Left.” During the 1960s, American government became Europeanized (Lowi Reference Lowi, Lowi and Stone1978)—or, to be more dramatic, nationalized. Until the 1960s, virtually all the governing in the United States was done by the states—and that includes all the New Deal legislation that was “delegated” to the states for implementation. This system changed after Brown v. Board of Education as a result of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and the enormous expansion of new national programs that finally completed the Roosevelt Revolution in the 1960s.

How did this governmental shift truly revolutionize the Republican Party? First off, national programs of regulation and redistribution were implemented through the national government, along with the traditional local government, in such matters as morality, family, education, social and racial classes, and public order. To conservatives, local means were the proper way to keep “our folks” in their proper place. City leaders rarely, if ever, had to look to Washington. In the face of new legislation, however, conservatives would have to nationalize their parochialism. For local and state politics, all that was needed to win arguments were one or more references to the Good Book. In national politics in Washington, you had to have intellect and you had to use it. But up through most of the 1980s, “conservative intellectual” was, in my class lectures, a good example of an oxymoron. Conservatives didn't have think tanks. Even the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) was still identified as “mainly conservative” in the early 1970s, but the institution was mainly libertarian and became significantly more conservative (in the genuine sense) as its budget climbed from $1 million to $12 million in less than a decade. The still more truly conservative Heritage Foundation was established in Washington in its own $9.5 million building in 1983, with a professorial research staff on a $10 million budget.

This growth is indicative of conservative interests' recognition that the only way to make their influence felt was through presence. There were moments in the past when the Right had showed enough muscle to gain nationwide recognition. They created enough of a rumble in the 1950s to get the center and left riled up to the point of writing numerous articles and books exposing the danger of this “radical right.” But the fact that this upsurge did not last seemed to validate Louis Hartz's thesis that there is no “conservative tradition” in America (Hartz Reference Hartz1955, 56; Lowi Reference Lowi2006). Following these events, the cream of the American sociologists put together two collections of their analyses, coupled with explanations of how and why this “radical right” would not endure. The first volume was The New American Right (Bell Reference Bell1955); the second, The Radical Right, was revised, expanded, and updated by the same author (Bell Reference Bell1964).

Another example of increased presence from the right occurred in the mid-1960s, sparked by an effort to get Barry Goldwater to stir up Christianity to mobilize cold warriors against the threat of a world communist conspiracy. Goldwater did not bite, and the second right-wing revival collapsed. A third succeeded by tying conservatism to party politics. In my 1995 book on conservatism (Lowi Reference Lowi1995), I identified two Republican factions comprising the right wing: the patrician or secular right, and the populist or Christian right. The left wing comprised one faction: liberal or libertarian. Eleven years later, in the second edition (Lowi Reference Lowi2006), I had to expand the Republican right wing to include five factions, with the first remaining the same, the second being aristocrats (traditional), the third being paleocrats (racial), the fourth being theocrats (religion), and the fifth being neocrats (a secular cult).

These factions were the making of the Reagan Republican party, but the group was not ready to govern beyond “anti-government,” because the right wing still lacked a sustained conservative presence in the nation's capital. This party was what Etzioni left the White House to join, and he chose a fortunate time, because the intellectual environment was no longer hostile to conservatism—or his version of it—and the work environment soon became downright hospitable.

Let us examine these environments one at a time, using Etzioni as a case study. During the 1970s, a new movement of conservatism was emerging, shedding most of its burden of libertarianism (e.g., Barry Goldwater, an acolyte of Ayn Rand). The movement got going with the impetus of a genuine philosopher Russell Kirk (my undergraduate teacher at Michigan State) and William F. Buckley, MI, a writer and the founder of the National Review. This growing arena provided a perfect niche for Etzioni, his conversion to communitarianism, and his institutionalization of the ideology in his Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies in Washington. He had a platform as well as support through his situation as a teaching instrument—a chaired professorship at the George Washington University. He was able to speak to the public—not, in my opinion, as a PI, but as an MI, because he was speaking to the chorus of the converted or the attracted. Alternatively, he was addressing his college classes and asking for discussion and criticism, which would then classify him as an AI. But I would not be very happy if one of my colleagues was trying, as an MI, to convert the students.

The work environment for conservatives was improving at an impressive rate, and their learning had to come from their adversary as the aforementioned “contamination from the Left.” Money was virtually unlimited for conservatives in Washington, thanks to Reagan's tax cuts and conservative citizens' willingness to give once they recognized that the national government had become as activist as European governments. Moreover, conservatives recognized that you cannot buy enough legislators, but you can win them over with research, and you cannot win without the data, the argument, the package, and the delivery. Two cases demonstrating this will suffice. AEI was founded in 1943 but barely held together for nearly 40 years, when the organization suddenly received enough of an endowment to expand their research staff tenfold, from $1 million in 1970 to $10.4 million in 1980, and to support a staff that grew from 19 in the early 1970s to 135 a decade later. Similarly, the Heritage Foundation, established in 1973, was able to support itself not only from the donations of a few rich families, but also from mail solicitation and sales of subscriptions for their periodicals and short “backgrounders.” Although farthest to the right among Washington conservatives, the Foundation's financing was impressively successful. Beyond their explicit fundraising, Heritage, along with AEI and other organizations, were educating their conservative members and supporters in the art and craft of discourse (Ricci Reference Ricci1993, 160–62).

AEI and Heritage are key examples of think tanks. There are many work environments and work stations outside the government in the industry of policy formulation, policymaking, and policy implementation, as well as inside the government in legislative committee staffs, individual House and Senate staffs, and agencies and their experts, that generate large numbers of government proposals. But the most recent example of such environments since conservatives came to Washington is the work station that we have come to call first by a nickname and then rather officially as the think tank—an organization dedicated to research for the purpose of advancing the interests of its clients or supporters by favoring certain policies and more broadly ideological goals. These think tanks are known for their policy positions while at the same time maintaining, at least formally, a nonpartisan commitment.Footnote ⁶

The most recent census of think tanks revealed 47 in Washington, DC, alone; the World Directory published by the National Institute for Research Advancement (NIRA)—a think tank itself!—reports 42 (NIRA 2005). That is one hell of a lot of research activity, and all of it has become a key feature in any treatment of American politics and government. Just as we had to embrace the random sample survey as the new institution of democracy no more than 50 years ago, so do we have to incorporate policy-oriented research and the institution of the think tank into democracy today.

“Research” implies objective, unbiased inquiry into the problems concerning policymakers. The client expects that satisfactory (and favorable) research will be generated, but any bad news must be included in a report as well. A think tank like Brookings could be classified as “liberal,” then, not because it is biased, but because its only clients are Democrats.

As wealthy conservatives began to understand the think tank concept, they discovered that they were being beaten by ideas. They created new think tanks and endowed small and needy ones. Most importantly, they began to attribute to established (liberal) think tanks exactly what they themselves were going to create: a movement mentality and orientation that were as ideological as possible. Moreover, the corporate money providers for these think tanks were able to attract trained academics who had converted from liberal (and left) to genuinely conservative positions—and from PI to AI and MI roles. I count Etzioni as one of these academics, and I do accept that his conversion from left to right was not “for the money.” I will, however, go so far as to say that although his conversion from the left to the conservatism of communitarianism was honest, his conversion during the conservative realignment of the 1970s had significant benefits for him, in that the movement embraced him and immediately raised him to very high and sought-after status and demand, beginning his self-stated career as a PI (but making him, in my terms, more of an MI).

It seems clear to me now that Etzioni's Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies is far too much like the evangelical think tanks and public policy programs and law schools that have flourished since the conservatives came to Washington. I would also include in this category the neatly scrubbed Federalist Society, whose leading members, along with Falwell acolytes, moved up to very high positions in the George W. Bush White House and to jobs as justices and clerks in the federal appellate courts and the Supreme Court itself. The addition of the term “communitarian” to his Policy Studies Institute separates Etzioni's institute from virtually all the other policy schools. Two hundred fifty-four schools belong to the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration (NASPAA) in the United States, beginning with Syracuse and Harvard in the 1920s. These programs all offer professional MPA degrees (some offer Ph.D.s as well), and they all share a dedication to professionalism and the improvement of public service in all layers of government and the whole range of public services, non-profits, NGOs, and the like. What separates Etzioni's institute from theirs is an -ism. Take careful note of his flagship statement:

I regret that I have to draw the line of defense between the academic social sciences and what Etzioni stands for. I am, of course, impressed by his learning and his output, and I am sure that many of his books and articles contribute to the advancement of all the social sciences. But I rise in opposition to the thrust of his work as an MI. To put my objection briefly, I have to say, “You're no Carl Sagan”—a scholar and a PI with whom Etzioni claims kinship. Sagan and I were colleagues at Cornell and shared stories about our respective experiences at the University of Chicago. Through this interaction, I had the opportunity to encounter two sides of his identity: first, as a public phenomenon, and second, as a teacher in introductory courses as well as the lab. Popularizer of ideas, yes, but he also opened up many millions of eyes to the romance of the unknown, the accessibility of science as an institution, and an appreciation of science as, in the words of the OED, “knowledge or cognizance … emphasizing the dysfunction to be drawn between theoretical perception of a truth and moral conviction.”

Misuses of “science” and “research” for ideological purposes have led me to invent a concept of the ideal teacher, who teaches not what to think, but what to think about. Those who did not know Allan Bloom (as I did at Cornell) could well have gotten the message from his most significant work, The Closing of the American Mind (1987), that we should open our minds. But, in fact, Bloom's appeal was for the closing of the mind around Western culture. He was the model MI.

I could probably have endorsed Etzioni as a PI 30 years ago—B.C., before conservatism—because he wrote many wake-up calls. But I cannot abide his position A.C., after conservatism. And I do not believe that political science should accept him now as a PI.

I am writing against this powerful figure in fear that he might win. The “About Us” section of the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies Web site is virtually a platform for the takeover of the right wing of the Republican Party. I was premature in the prediction in my book The End of the Republican Era (Reference Lowi1995; Reference Lowi2006), but I was wrong for all the right reasons. The Republican Party, I argued, was doomed by the schismatic tendency of all moral associations. Its ability to pull the moral absolutists together again was because the magnetic force of communitarianism is so accommodating. A look at the “About Us” statement reveals five kinds of moral appeal by name, none with any more theoretical basis than a soap opera: “morally informed,” “moral dialogue,” “moral climate,” “moral horizon,” and “moral implications and their likely practical consequences for family and community life.” According to its own pledge, the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies will produce communitarian and nonpartisan policymakers who will pursue policies that will keep everyone in their proper place within the community—races in their places, laborers in theirs, homeowners in theirs, artisans in theirs, and counter-mores workers and seekers in theirs. And so on.

In sum, there will be no place for PIs in the communitarian curriculum. Once this agenda is set, it will be all MI or nothing, because the test for graduation will be the Bloom-like closing of the student mind. This invitation by Robert Hauck, editor of PS, to respond to Etzioni's PI autobiography calls me back nearly 15 years to the time of the publication of the first edition of my book The End of the Republican Era. In its pages, I expressed my fear that “although Etzioni has not succeeded in organizing a movement, communitarian views have reached the White House and are indeed influencing the Clinton agenda” (Reference Lowi1995, 242). It is easy to be beguiled because “communitarianism today (1990) is just a form of good old-fashioned sentimentality…. Nobody likes crime and almost everybody agrees with the proposition that rights and responsibility ought to be linked” (244). Today, a concept that is also beguiling and worth repeating is that “liberalism is concerned with communities … [and] conservatives are concerned with community.” Liberalism is in danger of losing the race. In contrast, communitarian conservatism is so beguiling because it shows itself as “just a form of good old-fashioned sentimentality about traditional values.” What kind of stern egalitarianism could win out against a communitarian ruling by no less than the Clinton Department of Health and Human Services that stated in an official declaration that the “father's presence is crucial for [family dinner] to be a family hour” (Lowi Reference Lowi1995, 242)?

I will have to call such a platform the end of the PI. And from here into the distant future, until the dust clears, the discourse among the intellects will be “fair and balanced.”